Week 8 Recap: Olympics Edition

Danell Leyva of the U.S. Men’s Gymnastics team. Photo courtesty of USAToday.

Hard to believe that our 12 weeks are 2/3 over, but here we are. And the Olympics start tonight! I pack all of my sports watching into biennial two week periods (like a spectating camel) so it’s going to be an extra challenge for me to get anything done in the near future, when all I want to do is look at super-fit people doing active things in various states of undress.

Nevertheless, I’m determined to keep making progress. If you could give two craps about the Olympics, how are you going to handle the other distractions that are sure to come up at any point between now and the end of the summer? Don’t forget to update everyone on your progress in the comments!

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3 thoughts on “Week 8 Recap: Olympics Edition”

The past week was moderately productive for me, but not in the way that I wanted it to be. After stripping it basically down to the studs, I think I got my introduction back to a place where I’m pretty happy with it, and I think I solved a lot of the problems that my adviser pointed out. However, aside from watching some Lynda lectures about CSS (we get Lynda access free, Temple folks) I did jack-all for the online portion of my project. I know that it will be a major asset this fall as I go on the job/post-doc market, so I want it to be up and running, but I haven’t been able to build up enough inertia to do that. Part of my problem this week was that my sleep schedule was totally off–I’d sleep ten hours one night and then four the next, for no reason. On Thursday I woke up at 430 AM and just couldn’t go back to sleep, so I basically felt crazy all day. Hopefully my body will go back to a more normal sleep schedule this week.

Speaking of which, I’m switching up my goals a little. One is to spend at least fifteen minutes writing today and tomorrow, so that on Monday I still have my momentum from last week. Since I’ve been doing a five-day work week, I have a lot of trouble getting back up to speed every Monday, so I want to carry some momentum through the weekend. It’s going to be hard today, because I have to go to a wedding reception quite soon and I’m going to squeeze a run in, but I think I should be able to knock off a little bit of work later tonight. During the week I’m going to keep up with writing as soon as I wake up (if I’m not exercising in the morning), but then make my first hour of work after breakfast devoted to the website. If I don’t *actually* make it a priority, it won’t get done at all. After that, I’m still going to try for three hours of writing, because I want to meet my overall goals for the summer and time is running out!

After a few weeks of fits and starts, I felt like I hit my stride this week. Got an article revised and submitted to the Oral History Review, conducted two fruitful interviews, and after a flash of inspiration as I was falling asleep Thursday night, I woke up Friday morning and banged out a large chunk of what I had left for my last chapter. So, a really solid week, and a good one to end on – I’m heading to Scotland tomorrow for three weeks of backpacking followed be 5 days of racing. So that’s it for me until the semester starts – thanks for organizing the group, Dan! Nice to be held accountable each week. Good luck to everyone with the final push!

I think I missed a week there – life got pretty busy for me all of a sudden and I’ve been having a hard time finding the time to keep up with everything the last 1-2 weeks, so my goal starting today is to knuckle down and get back to full days of solid work from now until the end of August. Re: the Olympics (and distractions generally) I can’t let myself start watching or I know I’ll waste too much time – I’ve got my 3 favorite events marked down on the calender which I’ll tune in to watch I guess, but other than that I’ve set myself a pretty strict no-olympics rule for this month. I find I work best in short, concentrated bursts, so the easiest way to get things done for me is to just put in really, really long hours and completely ignore everything else for a period of a few days. That’s my plan for this week, I have catching up to do!

Generally, I’m happy that the writing is going well but I’m a bit disappointed at the pace of it – no matter how carefully I make a writing schedule everything seems to take about 2 x as long as I had planned. I’m happy to be getting things done, I just wish I was getting them done faster!